Ars Technicast, Episode 22—Tech horror stories

Remember that time you dropped your smartphone into the toilet? We do, too.

Most computer and gadget owners have lived through the nightmare of failed hard drives, fried circuits, cracked screens, and other horrors. Here at the Ars Technicast, we've had our share of tech mishaps. On this episode, Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Ars Contributors Andrew Cunningham and Casey Johnston, and Social Editor Cesar Torres share their own tech nightmares and share some of the ways they solved the problems. You'll also want to watch this archived clip of the day Jacqui's phone shattered and everyone at the table laughed, since we mention the anecdote throughout the show.

What's your tech horror story? Leave us a message in the comments and tell us what you did to resolve it. If you have pro tips on how to dry out hardware or perform extensive backups, share those with us, too.

Fresh out of school on my first job doing assembly programming for 8080 processors (in the age of the dinosaurs). I had just spent several hours typing in and saving my first program on an Intel Intellec MDS 80 development system. The 8" floppies (not a typo) were physically huge but logically tiny at only 80k capacity so I was told that it was essential to remove any unnecessary files from the disk as the ultra-primitive operating system didn't deal with running out of space (don't remember the details, but it may well have been a fatal error -- most events were.) Being keenly aware of this I then typed in the equivalent of DEL *.* fully expecting to be prompted for the deletion of each individual file -- as I had been on my university's operating system. The result was what you'd expect from a primitive OS. This provided me with a lasting lesson, "Never assume anything about the workings of an unfamiliar program."

402 posts | registered Jan 8, 2011

Cesar Torres
Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City. Emailcesar.torres@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Urraca

31 Reader Comments

The biggest tech nightmare I can think of wouldn't be breaking some expensive but replaceable device, but the shutdown of some massively useful service by the only company with the resources to adequately provide that service. Thank goodness no company would be foolish enough to destroy a valuable platform like that, infuriating millions of its users in the process!

More seriously, last year my new laptop beeped REALLY LOUDLY after I improperly configured the SSD I had just installed, a procedure that felt like open-heart surgery. Damn near gave me a heart attack, though changing the boot order fixed it.

I've seen others:* wipe out almost a month of work by having a {space} in a find+rm command inside a NASA control center; rm -rf directory* and rm -rf directory * ARE very different.* force an NASA control center server NFS failover by pulling a console a few inches closer to be read easier DURING ascent flight.. The server saw the console disconnect and started the failover. It made every flight controller loose access to all data for 20-40 seconds just after launch.* change the root password on a 4 hour old server, but not remember it 30 seconds later.

I've accidentally wiped out an OS and almost all files on a server shared by the entire development team trying to clean up browser cache files. Be careful with find - just sayin'.

Almost all of these were solved by having good backups. A few of them provided "opportunities for backup process improvement."

When I built my PC in the dark ages of 2007, it was a Windows Vista box, dual-booting into Windows XP on occasion for the things Vista couldn't handle right. A few years later, I bit the bullet, bought a Windows 7 disc, and formatted the Vista partition to install the new OS. I also wiped the XP installation, since I had XP Mode now and didn't need to devote a whole drive to it anymore.

Anyway. Flash forward to last month, when I decide I'm finally going to upgrade my hard drive so I can have more than 10 percent of my Steam games installed at once. Turns out, whoops! My current BIOS won't handle drives of 1 TB or more. So I steel myself, back up some crucial files just in case, and run the upgrade. The computer POSTs just fine......and loads up the Windows Vista boot manager, back from the dead and apparently feasting on the brains of the living, in the form of my Windows 7 install. Nothing I do will get it to boot into 7 - whether that's because the OS was actually damaged in some way or because the boot sector was irreparably FUBAR, I still don't know. But even the Windows install disc thought I had Vista installed, and telling it to repair the boot file (or make a new one from scratch) produces a progress bar that hangs at 0% for nine hours before I power off the computer.

It wasn't too complicated to rescue my files and format the relevant drives with an Ubuntu DVD, but I was freaking terrified that I'd just bricked my motherboard when that Vista screen kept popping up.

I spilled a large glass of chocolate milk onto the keyboard of my Dell Inspiron some years back. Ran into the kitchen and frantically tipped it upside down, watching the milk pour out of the keyboard, fan vents, SD card slot and USB ports. I cleaned it off as best I could and the next day, I tried to boot it. No go. The day after that, I could hear it boot, but the screen was still dead. The next day I went to a thrift store to pick up a cheap old monitor and hooked it up to the laptop to see what I could see. Lo and behold, when I started the thing, the screen came back to life! Took three days for it to recover, but everything was fine, with the exception of one of the case fans, which took the chocolate milk hit for the team.

That old beast of a laptop became my Mother's machine for several years, then the machine for a friend of the family's kid for a while before a faulty power brick finally fried the motherboard.

I have this nice robe; it's fuzzy and keeps you ridiculously warm. It also has plenty of pockets for putting things... like your smartphone! One day, I was doing laundry with the robe on, and I decided that I was going to wash it. So, I tossed the robe in the washer, and thought nothing of it. Later on, I was putting the damp clothes into the dryer when my eyes widened and jaw dropped. My 64GB iPhone 5 was sitting at the bottom of the drum!

Now, I've been using smartphones for about six years without incident, so I never bought AppleCare+ for the phone, and I dreaded the thought of paying full price (i.e. $850) for a replacement. Thankfully, it appears that you just pay a significantly larger fee ($229 vs $49) if you don't have AppleCare+. People may dislike Apple for whatever reason (I have my own gripes), but since I live near an Apple Store, it was ridiculously easy to get a new phone. I simply walked in, said that I damaged my phone, and asked for the $229 replacement. I was out in 10-15 minutes with a fully-functional phone!

I was bummed about the unexpected expense, but I was pleased at how fast I was able to resolve the dilemma.

It wasn't too complicated to rescue my files and format the relevant drives with an Ubuntu DVD, but I was freaking terrified that I'd just bricked my motherboard when that Vista screen kept popping up.

For future reference (and lurkers), if you see the Windows logo or a reference to Windows then it's well past the BIOS. At that stage, there'd be an issue with your master boot record (aka MBR), most likely. Whether due to a bad sector on the drive or what is impossible to say now, of course, but once you see Windows stuff, you know you havn't bricked the computer.

- Yes, I'm one of those people for whom hard-drive-in-the-freezer worked for about 25 minutes to rescue a non-booting drive, which was enough time to rescue the important data.

- On the topic of the volume of the panelists - if 10 is easy to hear:Jacqui - 10Casey - 8Caesar - 7Andrew - 4

In the segment tacked on after the main episode was done, Andrew was much easier to hear. I wish the audio in the main episode was tweaked the same way so that I didn't have to have Jacqui so loud or Andrew so quiet.

I have this nice robe; it's fuzzy and keeps you ridiculously warm. It also has plenty of pockets for putting things... like your smartphone! One day, I was doing laundry with the robe on, and I decided that I was going to wash it. So, I tossed the robe in the washer, and thought nothing of it. Later on, I was putting the damp clothes into the dryer when my eyes widened and jaw dropped. My 64GB iPhone 5 was sitting at the bottom of the drum!

I've done a number of stupid things, but perhaps the most dangerous was knocking over a glass of apple juice on my desk. Now, that doesn't sound too bad, but consider for a moment that liquids tend to spread very quickly. In my case, it spilled off the back of the desk and all over my UPS! Half awake, in a panic, I scrambled under my desk to switch the damn thing off before anything was seriously damaged. I manged to blindly find the power switch and got the living shit shocked out of me! Lesson learned: never touch an electrical device that's been submerged in liquid--unplug it from the outlet instead!

How did a Kernel Panic ruin all of your data? A bad hard drive would do that. Maybe your hard drive was throwing the panic.

Hard drives are one of the easier components to diagnose. Memory can be tricky, but it's easy swap it out and see what happens. They probably concluded that the HD was fine, but since there was no direct evidence the Logic Board was faulty they tinkered with the easy and more common things first.

Back before plug and play I unscrewed and unplugged a SCSI cable while my 7200 PPC was running cause I was too young and lazy to know any better. It's like I put the contents of my HD in a virtual blender. I had to boot up on the install CD and repair the disk. When I got to my files the were all in different folders with different scrambled names. Some of my Pref files were on the desktop and my fonts were in the Applications folder. I didn't lose a lot, but I learned my lesson. IF IT HAS SCREWS ON IT DON'T UNPLUG IT WHILE THE COMPUTER IS RUNNING. Although, that rule doesn't really apply anymore.

Today that computer is setup in my basement, and that same HD died on me last summer. That's about 16 years of life, and all I needed to do was swap out the HD to get it running again. NOT TOO SHABBY!

If you drop sticky liquids over a PC keyboard, do not disassemble the keysheet and individual keytops to clean and rinse the device. Its like $10 to replace. How much 2 hours of your precious free time is worth to you?

My poor old MacBook Pro has been through the mill. I spilt most of a cup of tea on it once and after a few hours of panic, it worked just fine but my lord - water damage is the most panic-inducing scenario. I have a friend who had a MacBook Pro, had owned it for a week and spilt gin all over the keyboard. To this day it has sticky keys.

I also managed to spectacularly shatter the screen. Being a lazy student at the time, the laptop was left on the floor. Guess what happened? I was insured and a week later I had a new screen but the amount of abuse my poor laptop has had is unbelievable.

My wife (a doctor) had her cellular phone fall out of her lab-coat pocket while bending over, into a kidney dish of fluid she'd just drained from a patients' abdomen. She fished it out (hopefully wearing gloves, I don't remember ever querying that part), turned it off and held it under a tap for a minute or two (as is, battery and all).When she got home, I was tasked with fixing it, so I simply removed the battery, undid as much of the casing as I could, and gave it a good wash again under running water. Left it on the windowsill in the sun for 2 days, popped in the battery, and it worked perfectly, for another 2 to 3 years. The good old days of tough Nokias.

I personally managed to drop my 11 day old blackberry bold about 20cm onto the tiled bathroom floor - cracked screen. Replacing the screen cost as much as I'd paid in on the contract to get the better phone. That's also still going strong, almost 3 years later.

The first time I installed a Intel Core processor with stock cooler (with those push-in plugs) and it just fell off after a while. I'm guessing one of the plugs wasn't properly in place but it certainly made me appreciate AMD when it comes to cooler installation...

(In the end the processor survived but the "oh damn" feeling was real)

One of my GF's friends called in a panic, she had dropped her cell phone into the toilet and wanted to know what she could do to salvage it. It turns out the water in the toilet was clean - I told her to remove the battery and bury the phone in rice for a few days. She brought it over later that day - with the phone inside of a plastic baggie. The baggie with the phone was buried in a Tupperware bowl full of rice.

Amazingly, After I got it dried out, it worked again - a Nokia flip phone.

I understand how updates are supposed to work but this one from Adobe didn'tit obviously did not restore the MBR to its original form or something else not even safe modeI did however have a day old image of the C:\ on my basement NAS4FreeI inserted the Acronis disk which boots and allows me to restore the latest one.win-7 is baaaaack4 quickbooks files had later backup and they were restoreda review of associated paperwork showed one entry to do over

IT WAS LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED

"oh what a relief it is"

the time the old P-III came up "BIOS check-sum error A:\" was a bit trickier

Fresh out of school on my first job doing assembly programming for 8080 processors (in the age of the dinosaurs). I had just spent several hours typing in and saving my first program on an Intel Intellec MDS 80 development system. The 8" floppies (not a typo) were physically huge but logically tiny at only 80k capacity so I was told that it was essential to remove any unnecessary files from the disk as the ultra-primitive operating system didn't deal with running out of space (don't remember the details, but it may well have been a fatal error -- most events were.) Being keenly aware of this I then typed in the equivalent of DEL *.* fully expecting to be prompted for the deletion of each individual file -- as I had been on my university's operating system. The result was what you'd expect from a primitive OS. This provided me with a lasting lesson, "Never assume anything about the workings of an unfamiliar program."

Dropped my Galaxy Nexus in the toilet. Got it out, immediately pulled battery and wiped it down well with Lysol wipes. Put it in a Tupperware container with rice and it worked great, I did warranty return it but that was for an issue from before.

More recently I was walking my dog and she wrapped me up in her leash, as she did I spun around to unwrap and as I did my phone fell out of my pocket onto concrete and the screen broke. Got my insurance replacement the next day, which lasted me all of 24 hours. I had the phone in my coat pocket from walking the dog. Coat was sitting on the chair and when I went to put it on to walk the dog before bed I noticed the cat had peed on it, put it in the washer and started it up, then went to walk the dog and couldn't;'t find my phone. Check my coat and yup, it was being washed. Again did the rice trick and it worked, but I did do the insurance this time because the refurb replacement was already going to go back, but if I had returned it with water damage I would have been charger $500, that sucked.

Back in the day I dropped my (giant) HTC Blue Angel[1] into a similarly giant mug that was half full of coffee. It survived but the keyboard's Fn key was ruined so I couldn't really type numbers anymore rendering it useless. I think WiFi or BlueTooth may have also started flaking out. In any case it wasn't a good phone anymore. I still have it, and it still works save for the things I already mentioned.

My iPhone 3GS went into a sink full of water and survived. I shut it down right away and let it dry out. It was in the water for mere seconds and I don't think any water got inside it. Not much anyway. Pretty boring but very cool that it survived. The same 3GS fell screen down and it completely spider webbed. Replaced the screen and that was that, except the tech left dust behind it. Grrr! Later I dropped it on a soft wood floor and the screen cracked, but not nearly as badly this time. Fuck. Luckily I scored a Nexus One from work and used that as my main phone with the 3GS tagging along in my other pocket as an iPod touch for iOS-only apps. I moved into a place with concrete floors and the 3GS didn't survive the next fall onto the floor. RIP 2011 iPhone 3GS (my first iPhone).

----

More interesting is the time I dumped an entire glass of chocolate milk directly onto my original 2006 Core Duo "Yonah" MacBook. The milk landed right on the keyboard above the CPU. I initialled panicked and froze. It shut down, presumably due to shorting out, which snapped me out of it. Now that I was lucid I immediately turned it upside down and then took out the battery. When the chocolate milk ceased to drip from the keyboard I began to disassemble my computer. First I removed the keyboard and cleaned it up as well as I could. Then I began sopping up chocolate milk from the motherboard, mainly on top of the CPU and around the CPU socket and heat sink. There was no way this machine would survive, and being a college student I was certain that I was fucked.

Luckily I had acted fast enough. The computer was salvaged! The battery lasted only a short hour or so, and I had to replace the keyboard because some of the keys were stuck and did not function. $200-300 is a lot easier to swallow when you initially expect to spend $1500 or so, so I ponied up for the new battery and keyboard. The machine chugged along for years after that, and it's not my main machine but it's beside me now and it still works 5-6 years later.

Even more amazing than that is that I actually learned the damn lesson: do not place drinks in front of the keyboard between my hands! It took one Happy Hacking keyboard and some pieces of my MacBook before I took it to heart. I would sit down and put my drink there and think "This is a huge mistake". Such a whippersnapper.

The one that I recall (probably of many) was corrupting the flash BIOS of a mainboard; I think it was a Pentium MMX, so flashable BIOses were still relatively new (this would have been circa 1996).

Fortunately, BIOS chips were nearly always socketed back then; after my brief panic (was a customer's system), I found a very similar mainboard in our "dead pile" with the same size BIOS chip/socket. I plugged that chip in the corrupted system long enough to boot, shadowed the BIOS in RAM, hot-swapped the BIOS chips with a chip-puller, and flashed the corrupted BIOS chip with correct code. Then sighed with relief when it worked.

A decade ago, my machine had a good old CRT monitor. My pet chipmunk (yes, that's possible to have as a pet) would sit on the top of it, looking back at me while I worked. One day, as I was working on something, the smell of heated electrical components hit my nostrils and almost immediately the CRT starts to brown out. The chipmunk had decided to pee and that went straight inside the CRT. I remember wildly yanking at the power cables and screaming at the chipmunk. I was almost sure everything had been fried. After a week of letting all dry, I turned the system on and the system had survived.Even now, any reference to the pet invariably involves a shudder-memory about this incident.

I dropped my iPhone 3GS into the toilet, unfortunately. I immediately pulled it out, wiped it down as best I could, and stuffed it into a bed of rice (handy due to tactile game playing with my toddler). Probably 45 seconds at most from beginning to end, maybe 30. I left it in the rice for a reasonable period of time. Upon taking it out, it worked some for about a week, after which it died. Fatally, completely, etc.

I cracked my 2009 13-inch MBP screen when it was 2 months. Bad enough, but it continued working. One month later, two days before the new year, the MBP got stolen. It had 13,000 photos, and 80 GB of data. My phone went too, together with my wallet. And oh, I had not backed up the MBP. Was obliterated into stone age for the next 6 months. How's that for ending the festive season and beginning a new year?

I changed the position of the 115/240V switch on a power supply of the PC that my mother had brought home for the school holidays. Whilst it was plugged in (but not turned on). That took out the power supply (at the very least) and my parents had take it back to my mother's work and get a replacement. It was one of the first PCs I'd ever seen up close, and I was wondering what the little switch on the back did.